Evil Allen Morgan attempted to cover up the murder plot of his wife Carol Morgan using slyness and deceit – and for 40 years, he got away with it.
Carol was just 36 when her bludgeoned body was discovered by Morgan, now 74, in the store room of their corner shop, Morgan’s Food Fare, on August 13, 1981. As detailed in ITV documentary The Real Unforgotten, the second part of which airs this evening at 9pm, the mother-of-two suffered between 10 and 15 blows, with the murder weapon believed to have been an axe or a machete.
Although murder was initially treated as a robbery gone wrong, detectives found it hard to believe the attacker would have carried out such a horrific attack for a relatively meagre £450 pinched from the till and some stolen cigarettes.
Detective Constable Denise Brown, who features in the ITV documentary, told the Mirror: “The hypothesis back then was that whoever killed Carol must have known her, just because of the way the crime scene was found. It looked like she was making a cup of tea.
“They had locked the dog away in the bedroom, where normally that dog would have been roaming free. We know the footprints were a size 7 Dunlop trainer, and a young man across the road had seen someone leave the shop in a red car.”
At the time, there were whispers in the community in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, about Morgan’s suspected involvement; however, the twisted husband took calculated measures to cover his tracks.
In various TV interviews, Morgan described how he’d taken his stepchildren, Dean and Jane, then aged 14 and 12, to an Odeon cinema some 25 miles away in Luton, where they’d sat through two films. He’d even kept parking receipts. Once home at around 10.30pm, Morgan told the children to go upstairs and make a coffee, without calling Carol’s name once. He then rang the police to inform them of the devastating discovery.
DC Brown, 49, believes Carol was killed by a person known to Morgan, who wasn’t a professional hitman. To this day, this individual has never been caught. The detective explained: “He took out two lots of money from the cash point leading up to this, and our hypothesis is that that money was used to pay the hitman off.”
Within the major crime unit, cold cases are reviewed by a dedicated team every few years and, in the case of Carol, they “knew it was a runner,” DC Brown continued: “We could see from Allen’s timeline that there were holes and that it just didn’t make sense. It needed to be explored. We needed contradictions that went against what Allen said.”
She led the interview strategy, which saw officers question both Morgan and his new wife Margaret Morgan, 75. It’s believed the pair had been carrying on an affair for a year before Carol’s death. Just two weeks after the murder, she’d moved in.
After the case was reopened in 2018, more than 80 officers worked around the clock for six years to solve the grim puzzle. However, it took a breakthrough witness statement to set the wheels in motion, which ultimately led to Morgan’s downfall.
As they strived to bring Carol’s killer to justice, officers returned to every house they had originally door-knocked during the 1981 investigation, hoping to dig up fresh evidence. When they reached Jane Bunting’s home, the pieces of the puzzle finally started to fall into place.
Although Jane no longer lived at the address, her mum did. As she answered the door, she told officers: “My Jane’s been waiting 40 years for you to speak to her.”
Margaret had worked as a teacher for expelled students and had mentored Jane, but they soon formed a friendship — so much so that when Margaret’s affair with Morgan came to light, she moved in with the Bunting family for a brief period of time.
Jane, 60, had been harbouring a secret for all these years, with police suspecting she was too afraid to speak out as a then-17-year-old woman living in a tight-knit community. A few months before the tragedy, Jane had overheard an “appalling” conversation in the pub between Morgan and her ex-boyfriend that she’d never forgotten.
He’d asked if he knew anyone who could kill, with Morgan stating: “’I hate Carol’, ‘I don’t want to be married to her’, ‘I wish she’d die’, ‘Wouldn’t an accident be nice?’.”
The Morgans had spiralling debts, and Carol had bequeathed everything to her husband in her will. Meanwhile, the shop also had a life insurance policy linked to it. DC Brown explained: “There wasn’t hard evidence, there wasn’t CCTV, we’d been slowly building a circumstantial case and so when Jane came along, that was the final thing for us. It put that piece of the jigsaw in place.”
Last summer, following a trial at Luton Crown Court, Morgan was sentenced to life with a minimum of 22 years after being found guilty of conspiring to murder. Margaret Morgan was found not guilty of the same offence. The mysterious hitman remains at large.
*The first episode of The Real Unforgotten aired 18th February, 9pm on ITV1 & ITVX. Both episodes dropped on ITVX on February 18th. The second episode will air this evening, on ITV1, 25th February.
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